#magical boys

bisexualbaker:

iamthespineofmybook:

somerandomweirdo:

there’s always someone who’s like “magical girl is about empowerment and magical boys RUIN it!!!” while failing to realize five things:

1) the magical girl genre was literally inspired by the magical wife genre (bewitched and i dream of jeannie, to be more specific), which isn’t exactly female empowerment per se (no, magical girls didn’t start out with sailor moon, jeez);

2) gay/gnc boys don’t really get a lot of empowerment, since all the male empowerment series are either toxic masculinity up the wazoo or meant exclusively for straight boys and magical boy series tend to both break the toxic masculinity thing and be pretty darn gay;

3) most magical boy series are made by women, either completely or partially so, meaning that not considering them part of that empowerment is ignoring what female writers have to say and dang, i think real women are at least a bit more important than fictional ones;

4) by making magical girls as an exclusively feminine thing you’re creating one more gender role instead of breaking existing ones. you should be striving to make a girls-only team of butch lesbian power rangers, cool uniforms and all (because not all girls love frilly skirts y'know), instead of wanting to neatly separate everything by binary genders.

5) magical girls are basically witches (or at least they’re inspired by them). warlocks exist. therefore, magical boys are basically warlocks.

Moreover, stop calling every concept you dislike a “parody not worth watching”, because that’s exactly what people thought of SAILOR MOON 30 years ago. you’re treating media for women and mostly by women a thing to be ignored and derided exactly like people did 30 years ago, just because you dislike the concept of gnc men fighting in a softer way and think it’s threatening to your performative feminism.

and don’t you ever talk about gay/gnc/trans rights to me if you keep thinking this way. a lot of gay/gnc/trans guys are happy to see magical boy series that are far more relatable to them than the more macho super sentai series of yore. and if your feminism fails to recognize that the patriarchy and toxic masculinity culture hurts usallandeveryone needs to have alternatives to escape from it, you are basically two steps away from being a terf.

The first thing that came to mind while reading this was the very excellent webcomic, Magical Boy, a story of a trans boy who comes from a long line of magical girls. His mom isn’t very supportive, but every time he transforms, his costume changes a little more to match him.

The second thought was of the “male witches are warlocks” thing. Specifically thinking of Geoffrey from the Discworld novel, The Shepherd’s Crown, who is a boy and a witch, not a warlock.

I also saw recently on a Wiki Walk that there’s a magical boy in I think one of the Precure shows, but I’d have to double check on that. He came up on the trope page for fan trans interpretations.

I swear I read somewhere that Rebecca Sugar conceptualized Steven Universe as a magical boy story.

^ yes!

He’s also a bi trans/nonbinary metaphor in canon (Rebecca Sugar is bi and nonbinary)

one of the composers liked a tweet asking ‘does this mean Steven is canon bi’ in reference to something, so I choose to believe it’s more than metaphor

(gently places my sexy villainous magical boy OC here) :]

magicalbois

Some commissions for @kitsutenshi of our boys that I love very much